These days there seems to be much gloom, fear, and desolation. But the gloom that shrouds us is our own mind. Mind is our doom, and mind is our enlightenment. Choose your mind. If you live in the kingdom of fear, it is by your self-will. In truth, you are heading toward an age of enlightenment, creativity, and joy. But the light is not merely given. It must be chosen - or postponed.
"The kingdom of heaven is within You." Not within Us, but within You, within Me. You and I are each invited to manifest the kingdom, not to wait for its general manifestation in the collective.
Yes, an Age of Enlightenment is approaching, but illumination will not come from the government, the identity group, the commune, the tribe, or the sangha. It shines from the sovereign heart of the Person who takes responsibility for his or her own wholeness.
Only when your heart center, your hridaya, is Self-Radiant, may you contribute to the mutual irradiation of the family, the community, and the nation. The current trend toward collectivism, both in spirituality and politics, has delayed our development. Collectivism is meaningful as an end, not as a means. Only realized individuals can participate in the collective without losing their individuality. To merge in the collective - either spiritually or politically - without maintaining your individual personhood, is to fall backward in evolution.
Collectivism was an immature attempt to by-pass individual work on our own hearts. It was based on the presumption that we can step right into a self-realized sangha, an enlightened political party, or a healing tribal experience, without first awakening our selves. You came into this world alone, you will leave it alone, you are liberated alone. And you don't like hearing this. Yet aloneness is your ticket.
Through aloneness you become self-aware. The ocean gains self-awareness by leaping into a wave, then into a separate droplet. Only then may the alone fall back into the all-one, without losing individual self-awareness. This is how God becomes Self-realized again and again throughout eternity. This is how God has fun!
In current spiritual lingo we hear a lot of talk about the problem of "separateness." Did you not have to separate from your mother? Did you not separate from the Garden of Eden, wandering forth to find your way, your story? Do you think you'll be happier with a surrogate Daddy Guru or Nanny State to take away the sentience and response-ability of being an individual? Do you want to merge into the womb of the collective in order to drown the pain of being an actual person?
Let's stop fleeing from separateness and just start dancing where we are. Our dance only has meaning and delight when we dance in a world of passionately delineated, clearly differentiated creatures, each a self alone.
The divine Sun beamed forth You and I as separate rays, to manifest our own unique frequency, our own color of the rainbow, our own keynote in the symphony. You cannot dance my dance, I cannot dance yours. Praise God! It must be your own dance. Then only will you find meaningful partners in the circle, because they are divinely Other. And only Others can become One.
On a more material level, communities are not served by those who live in lack. Those who have something to give are the ones who uplift their neighbors. The abundance you seek does not flow down in a gravy train from the State, or from the Guru, or from the Collective. Abundance generates from the silent core of your heart. Flows outward, not down. Flows from you, not to you.
Now taste the exquisite paradox in being a unique particle of wholeness. Not a part of the whole, but a particle made out of wholeness. Repose in your hologram as a blossom reposes in its seed. Through the seed of individuation, wholeness flowers. That is the Way. You can fill the earth with your personal fragrance. As the drop longs to return to the sea, so the sea longs to feel dropness. Through the tuning fork of your own song, let the universe find harmony.
Image: Pinterest, used many times for over 10 years
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